Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s travelogue written and published first in Bangla in 1977 titled Karuna Tomar Kon Patha Diye fills the gap in an important sub genre of travel literature in that it narrates a road story of a woman. The work was first published in the special edition of Desh, a Bengali periodical…
At a key moment in this novel, the protagonist Uma reflects upon a Baul song by Lalon Shah, evoking the mysterious allure of Mirror City—‘a place that adjoins one’s home, yet remains forever unreachable’. This is also the feeling we get about the city of Dhaka as it appears in Chitrita Banerji’s…
Ismat Chughtai has often been described as Urdu’s most courageous and also controversial woman writer, which is not to say that the epithet ‘controversial’ has worked to her disadvantage. Think Ismat: think delightful, fiery, provocative and well known feminist stories, never mind if they are occasionally heart breaking too.
It is doubtful whether even the most confirmed admirers of M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s novels will judge Varanasi (2002) as a mature or profound work. The reason? Certainly not the lack of good, solid ingre-dients in the composition.
Written between 1991 and 1993, Daruwalla’s collection celebrates the histories and legends of the grand Persian Empire, a phase of history barely glanced at in contemporary literature. The book explores the stories of the kings—Darius, Cyrus and Alexander.
The second book by S.K. Saksena, the distinguished Professor of Philosophy, collects his essays on western philosophy and Hindustani music. There are a range of meditations on Hegel, Kant and Croce and how their theories illuminate Indian musics.